Is it possible to shut down wikileaks

Technical users can also use Tails to help ensure you do not leave any records of your submission on the computer. If you have any issues talk to WikiLeaks. We are the global experts in source protection — it is a complex field. Even those who mean well often do not have the experience or expertise to advise properly. This includes other media organisations. If you are a high-risk source, avoid saying anything or doing anything after submitting which might promote suspicion.

In particular, you should try to stick to your normal routine and behaviour. If you are a high-risk source and the computer you prepared your submission on, or uploaded it from, could subsequently be audited in an investigation, we recommend that you format and dispose of the computer hard drive and any other storage media you used.

In particular, hard drives retain data after formatting which may be visible to a digital forensics team and flash media USB sticks, memory cards and SSD drives retain data even after a secure erasure. If you used flash media to store sensitive data, it is important to destroy the media. If you do this and are a high-risk source you should make sure there are no traces of the clean-up, since such traces themselves may draw suspicion.

If a legal action is brought against you as a result of your submission, there are organisations that may help you. The Courage Foundation is an international organisation dedicated to the protection of journalistic sources. WikiLeaks publishes documents of political or historical importance that are censored or otherwise suppressed.

We specialise in strategic global publishing and large archives. The following is the address of our secure site where you can anonymously upload your documents to WikiLeaks editors. You can only access this submissions system through Tor. See our Tor tab for more information. We also advise you to read our tips for sources before submitting. If you cannot use Tor, or your submission is very large, or you have specific requirements, WikiLeaks provides several alternative methods.

Contact us to discuss how to proceed. This FAQ aims at answering some of the most common questions about WikiLeaks, its motivation, structure and related topics. The most important question is this FAQ is addressed last: The one about how to help.

If you understand the value and the vision behind this service, consider lending it a hand. Its independence depends on your decision to keep it that way. WikiLeaks is multi-jurisdictional platform to anonymously accept classified or otherwise restricted documents from whistleblowers that are in the interest of the public and publish these, uncensorable, unfiltered and available to everyone. The WikiLeaks platform is a Wikipedia-like Mediawiki.

It combines the protection and anonymity of cutting-edge cryptographic technologies with the transparency and simplicity of a wiki interface.

WikiLeaks incorporates advanced cryptographic technologies to ensure anonymity and untraceability. Those who provide leaked information may face severe risks, whether of political repercussions, legal sanctions or physical violence. Accordingly, sophisticated cryptographic and postal techniques are used to minimize the risks that anonymous sources face. WikiLeaks information is distributed across many jurisdictions, organizations and individuals. Once a document is leaked it is essentially impossible to censor.

Volunteer to help. Almost everyone can be of some assistance. The general public classically is introduced to a leaked document via such journalists and the general media. Whistleblowers can utilize the WikiLeaks submission system to submit confidential or otherwise unpublished materials to WikiLeaks, and thus to the global public and media.

WikiLeaks will soon be offering a service by which sources can submit documents to specific news outlets in order to pass information for example to a reporter of choice, but being guaranteed WikiLeaks anonymization techniques.

Wikileaks staff, who are investigative journalists, forensically examines all documents and labels any suspicions of inauthenticity based on a forensic analysis of the document, means, motive and opportunity, cost of forgery and so on. We have become world leaders in this, and have never , as far as anyone is aware, made a mistake. Given that many of the most prestigious newspapers, including the New York Times [Judith Miller, ], have published reports based on fabricated documents, Wikileaks believes that best way to truly determine if a document is authentic is to open it up for analysis to the broader community - and particularly the community of interest around the document.

So for example, let's say a Wikileaks' document reveals human rights abuses and it is purportedly from a regional Chinese government. Some of the best people to analyze the document's veracity are the local dissident community, human rights groups and regional experts such as academics. They may be particularly interested in this sort of document.

But of course Wikileaks will be open for anyone to comment. Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to stronger scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency can provide. Wikileaks provides a forum for the entire global community to relentlessly examine any document for its credibility, plausibility, veracity and validity. Communities can interpret leaked documents and explain their relevance to the public. If a document comes from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community and diaspora can freely scrutinize and discuss it; if a document arrives from Iran, the entire Farsi community can analyze it and put it in context.

Sample analyses are available here. It is envisaged that people will be able to comment on the original document, in the way you can with a wiki. When someone else comes along to look at the document, he or she will be able to see both the original document and the comments and analysis that have been appended to it in different places, but it is not possible to modify the original document, which remains pristine. Journalists and governments are often duped by forged documents.

It is hard for most reporters to outsmart the skill of intelligence agency frauds. Wikileaks, by bringing the collective wisdoms and experiences of thousands to politically important documents will unmask frauds like never before.

Wikileaks is an excellent source for journalists, both of original documents and of analysis and comment. Wikileaks will make it easier for quality journalists to do their job of getting important information out to the community.

Getting the original documents out there will also be very helpful to academics, particularly historians. We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people.

We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly - in terms of human life and human rights. But with technological advances - the internet, and cryptography - the risks of conveying important information can be lowered.

In an important sense, WikiLeaks is the first intelligence agency of the people. Better principled and less parochial than any governmental intelligence agency, it is able to be more accurate and relevant. It has no commercial or national interests at heart; its only interest is the revelation of the truth. Unlike the covert activities of state intelligence agencies, Wikileaks relies upon the power of overt fact to enable and empower citizens to bring feared and corrupt governments and corporations to justice.

WikiLeaks will aid every government official, every bureaucrat, and every corporate worker, who becomes privy to embarrassing information that the institution wants to hide but the public needs to know. What conscience cannot contain, and institutional secrecy unjustly conceals, Wikileaks can broadcast to the world.

WikiLeaks will be the forum for the ethical defection and exposure of unaccountable and abusive power to the people. Consider the mosquito borne disease malaria. Great Britain used to have malaria.

In North America, malaria was epidemic and there are still a handful of infections each year. In Africa malaria kills over people per hour.

However, email 33 is the exact same message , sent at the same time by the same sender, but to a different person at the AKP. It would have been trivial for WikiLeaks to identify those duplicate files and scrub them, but the organization chose not to. Even a casual perusal puts database explorers in grave peril. On the first page of leaks emails, listed in order by document ID number, there are at least three emails with active malware links. Sure enough, when I tried to download the attached zip file, Chrome and Firefox blocked it, flagging it as malicious.

But other browsers do not protect WikiLeaks explorers — including the ubiquitous Safari. Safari goes so far as to unzip the file for you, unprompted. The code found inside the zip file looks like this:. Enjoy the words in green, which look like gibberish but are mostly English words spelled backwards. Presumably this was an attempt to evade detection by malware scanners. Instead of a shining example of transparency, Wikileaks has degraded into a malware snakepit.

The malicious attachments housed in WikiLeaks are a direct consequence of its stance on so-called accuracy. WikiLeaks, in general, resists redacting leaks. In , after the release of its trove of war documents, human rights organizations criticized the group for not removing the names of Afghans who assisted the U.

This cavalier attitude is also a sign that WikiLeaks is likely underpowered for the scale of work it is doing — and that it does not care.

Where it had earlier recognized the need for collaboration, tapping experts and journalists across the world to investigate the files in its possession and occasionally redact them, it now abdicates responsibility for the contents of its documents. The result is a growing disenchantment with its brand of radical, adversarial journalism.

He may indeed have ambitions of swaying the upcoming U. A media organization that endangers the lives of ordinary citizens is not challenging authority but reinforcing it.

A media organization that lures people to its site, only to blatantly and knowingly expose them to malware, is not an institution that cares for its readers. If the computer you are uploading from could subsequently be audited in an investigation, consider using a computer that is not easily tied to you.

Technical users can also use Tails to help ensure you do not leave any records of your submission on the computer. If you have any issues talk to WikiLeaks. We are the global experts in source protection — it is a complex field. Even those who mean well often do not have the experience or expertise to advise properly. This includes other media organisations. If you are a high-risk source, avoid saying anything or doing anything after submitting which might promote suspicion.

In particular, you should try to stick to your normal routine and behaviour. If you are a high-risk source and the computer you prepared your submission on, or uploaded it from, could subsequently be audited in an investigation, we recommend that you format and dispose of the computer hard drive and any other storage media you used. In particular, hard drives retain data after formatting which may be visible to a digital forensics team and flash media USB sticks, memory cards and SSD drives retain data even after a secure erasure.

If you used flash media to store sensitive data, it is important to destroy the media. If you do this and are a high-risk source you should make sure there are no traces of the clean-up, since such traces themselves may draw suspicion. If a legal action is brought against you as a result of your submission, there are organisations that may help you. The Courage Foundation is an international organisation dedicated to the protection of journalistic sources.

WikiLeaks publishes documents of political or historical importance that are censored or otherwise suppressed. We specialise in strategic global publishing and large archives.